I worked with Cp7 now switched to Cp8. Previously I worked with Articulate Presenter. I am not comparing these two products.
I use Captivate on a daily basis and people ask me how I find this product. I am glad I found this topic though.
I could say it sucks (and I think it does suck as an Adobe product) but instead I will be editing this reply as I am feeling very, very constructive and serious about commenting on its usability. Regardless my constructive criticism the silver lining is that probably there is no better e-learning authoring tool on the market right now.
- Workflow is a new buzzword for Adobe but Captivate really lacks integration with other products. Integration with Photoshop is only possible if you have a full TCS. I love using Illustrator for vector artwork. Captivate should be integrated with it but it is not. At least it should support scalable vector graphics (SVG) as it claims to support HTML5 output.
In a nutshell, Captivate is really falling behind the CC mainstream, features, integration, and #workflow in overall.
Solution: make it CC. - Animating in Captivate can turn into a nightmare. If you are ambitious to create 30 seconds long animation, you will fail in Captivate. Controlling timeline after about 15 seconds or 500 frames is literally wasting your productivity and company's money.
Gotta switch to Flash and...struggle with conversion to HTML5 hassle during production. Too many workarounds.
Solutions: use Flash technology to control timeline. - Text formatting: ALL CAPS formatting is missing.
- Navigation: some interface parts do not support mouse scroll. Painful e.g. for a large number of master slides selection to use a little triangle.
- What I found Captivate does pretty well is a movie compression (SWF to MP4 for instance). But I used it once...and because I had to import SWF animation in Flash.
- Advanced actions and system variables are cool stuff. For any advance work you may end up with a bunch of variables and hardly reusable actions but for anything more advanced you can use JavaScript and widgets.
- Not compatible with Adobe Bridge - no preview thumbnail for at least a first slide. In fact this is a proprietary Adobe extension so it should provide preview for each individual slide - just like for Illustrator artboards or InDesign pages. No default metadata for e.g. the number of slides or so.
- Finally, there are 3 different states for shapes with a button function. You can show a different color for hovering over a button. Nice.